Fragonard painted several young girls in moments of quiet solitude.
These works are not portraits but evocations, similar to the "fantasy
portraits" Fragonard made of acquaintances as personifications of poetry
and music. He painted these very quickly—in an hour, according to friends—using bold, energetic strokes. A Young Girl Reading is painted
over such a fantasy portrait and shares its brilliant technique. The girl's
dress and cushion are painted with quick and fluid strokes, in broad
unblended bands of startling color: saffron, lilac, and magenta. Her
fingers are defined by mere swerves of the brush. Using the wooden tip of a
brush, Fragonard scratched her ruffed collar into the surface of the paint.
This is the "swordplay of the brush" that Fragonard's contemporaries
described, not always with universal approval. His spontaneous brushwork,
rather than the subject, becomes the focus of the painting. Fragonard
explored the point at which a simple trace of paint becomes a recognizable
form, dissolving academic distinctions between a sketch and finished
painting.